The age our bodies reach a ‘tipping point’ and stop bouncing back

Sticks and stones may break your bones — but they won’t heal as easily past a certain age.

New research has found the “point of no return” when we no longer recover as well from illness and injury, no matter how strong and healthy you may feel.

According to researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada, once we hit around the age of 75, the body can’t recover as well as it once did from adverse events.

Researchers measured the health of nearly 13,000 people with an average age of 67 based on more than 30 attributes, including chronic diseases, cardiovascular conditions and how they performed activities.

They used the Frailty Index, a tool that measures how many health deficits a person has, which generally states the well-known fact that as a person’s age increases, their functional capacity decreases.

Using it as a measure and building a new mathematical model of human aging, researchers looked at changes in two key health areas — adverse health events like illness or injury, and recovery time.

If the Index increased, it meant a participant was experiencing more health setbacks and not recovering as well.

Unsurprisingly, recovery time and health setbacks both increased with age for participants across the board.

But researchers discovered a tipping point age range for both men and women of 73 to 76 years where recovery rate couldn’t keep up with illness or injury.

“We infer that robustness and resilience mitigate environmental stressors only up to an age of 75, beyond which health deficits will increasingly accumulate, leading to death,” the researchers wrote in their study.

And you’re not imagining things if you wake up one morning, look in the mirror and think you somehow got older overnight, as research also shows the aging process is more dramatic than we think.

Other studies have shown different parts of the body have various periods of drastic aging.

A 2024 study looking at molecular changes associated with aging found that we have two abrupt increases in age — one at an average age of 44 and the other around 60 years old.

And our tissue and organs suddenly start aging faster, as one study found they have their own turning point around age 50.

While the study’s findings may seem morbid, researchers do point out that early intervention to remove stressors could be beneficial, as “crossing the tipping point dramatically increases risk for and accumulation of health deficits if stressors are not reduced.”

Healthy habits implemented before we reach the tipping point age, like daily physical activity and a healthy diet, could be more helpful than trying to extend or improve the declining period.

But there are also ways to reduce the risk of injury as we get older, such as strength and balance exercises and getting your hearing and vision checked.